1.6. PITCH AND ACCENTS 43
construction uses the particle ’yori’ and, like before, the order is quite op-
posite:
Y yori X no hou ga ii to omoimasuTrying to project the way ’rather’ works in Englsih onto what ’yori’
means can easily lead to confusion: the English word ’rather’ assumes that
the most important bit is on the left, so if we think ’yori’ does the same
- because we know it can be translated as ’rather’ – we might mistakenly
believe that this sentence says ”I would rather have Y than X”, instead of
what it really means, ”I would rather have X than Y”.
While potentially confusing at first, this reversal of placement for
emphasis becomes more intuitive the more one practices Japanese.
That said, having ”core information” at the end of a sentence pro-
duces a unique problem when interpreting or translating Japanese: how
does one deal with trailing sentences? In English, when the laĴer part of a
sentence is left off, the most important information has already been pre-
sented, so when the sentence is cut off we might be missing the details, but
only the details. In Japanese, and other languages where more important
information comes later in the sentence, leaving off the laĴer part of a sen-
tence leaves a reader or listener with the details, but no knowledge of what
these details actually apply to!
While, of course, this doesn’t lead to problems for people who grew
up using a language in which emphasis comes later in a sentence, this ’fea-
ture’ can be a great pain for people who grew up with ”important bits
first”. To them, it feels very much like the language is based on the con-
cept of ”filling in the blanks”, without any indication of what can be used
to fill them in. Sadly, this too can only be remedied through continued ex-
posure to, in this case, Japanese, so that one becomes intuitively familiar
with which words might be implied if they’re left off.
1.6 Pitch and accents
Linguistically speaking, Japanese - like various other Asian languages such
as Thai or Chinese - uses syllablepitchto placeaccentsin words. Quite of-
ten you will find this explained as Japanese being a language with two
pitch levels, high and low, which makes it relatively easy to learn com-
pared to a more complicated language (in terms of pitch) such as Chinese,
which has four pitch levels for Mandarin, and at least six for Cantonese.
However, this creates the false impression that there are only two tones